Dr Leon Wainwright BA (UEA) MA PhD (SOAS)

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Profile summary

Professional biography

I joined The Open University in June 2011. After teaching at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London), I was Research Fellow in Visual Culture and Media at Middlesex University (2000-2002) on the curriculum change project, GLAADH and Lecturer in Art History at the University of Sussex (2002-4). During 2004-5 I completed long-term fieldwork on issues around art and agency in Trinidad, Guyana and other locations in the Caribbean, with support from The Leverhulme Trust (Early Career Fellowship) and Sussex. Before moving to the OU, I was Reader in History of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University.

I recently won the Philip Leverhulme Prize, awarded by The Leverhulme Trust ‘to outstanding young scholars of substantial distinction and promise’.

Research interests

The path of my work as an art historian has spanned a range of fields and disciplines, institutions and cultures, and outlined a dynamic field of inquiry into art in an expanded and interconnected global field.

I have worked to redefine the geographical scope of the mainstream of art history as a discipline through the study of art, migration and cultural transmission in Europe, North America, the Caribbean and Asia. I have also tried to show how art history may interact more creatively with other disciplines, with art practice, museum curating, arts organising, and the public understanding of art.

At present I am co-editing the Routledge Companion to Global Art Histories (with Diana Newall and Grant Pooke), and a new volume in the Wiley Blackwell book series Art in Theory: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (with Charles Harrison and Paul Wood) -- the latest volume in the well-known Art in Theory titles.

I am Principal Investigator of ‘Sustainable Art Communities: Creativity and Policy in the Transnational Caribbean’, a project running for two years from September 2012, with Co-Investigator, Professor Dr. Kitty Zijlmans (University of Leiden), the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, and the Institute for International Visual Arts (inIVA), London. The project explores how the understanding and formation of sustainable community for the Caribbean and its diaspora may be supported by art practice, curating and museums. It fosters networks of exchange and collaboration among academics, artists, curators and policymakers from the UK and the Netherlands, as well as various countries in the English and Dutch-speaking Caribbean and their diaspora. ‘Sustainable Art Communities’ is a Research Networking and Exchange Project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

The project builds on two previous internationally-funded projects:

‘Creativity and Innovation in a World of Movement’, a consortium of four projects that each had a Principal Investigator, of which I was one. Through my project’s overseas fieldwork and range of publications, I focused attention on the patterns and relationships between art and world-wide experiences of human migration and global flows of capital. Among the outcomes of this grant was a deeper art historical understanding of the contemporary Caribbean and dissemination of knowledge to other disciplines – namely social anthropology, religious studies and museum ethnography -- and the knowledge transfer website, ‘CIM:Resource’ designed as a research-informed application for teaching and learning. This interdisciplinary collaboration between universities in the UK, Norway and the Netherlands was led by Queen’s University Belfast and funded by the European Science Foundation (as part of a €1,000,000, HERA JRP consortium in the largest EU-wide funding scheme in the humanities).

'Disturbing Pasts: Memories, Controversies and Creativity’, which connected three of the international consortia funded by HERA (CIM, PhotoCLEC and MAW), with myself as Principal Investigator. This received significant Knowledge Transfer and Network Funding from the Humanities in the European Research Area, Joint Research Programme (HERA JRP, European Science Foundation). It included an international conference (November 2012, Museum for Ethnology, Vienna), that brought together artists, photographers, curators, policy-makers and academics from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, and was covered extensively in the Open University’s Open Arts Archive and a forthcoming issue of the Open Arts Journal.

Member of the review group for the subject benchmark statement for History of Art, Architecture and Design, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education
(QAA)

Member of the Peer Review College of The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), UK; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the European Science Foundation; and reviewer for numerous academic journals and publishers

Teaching interests

I especially welcome informal enquiries about studying for a PhD in an area that would illuminate new directions for art history, focusing on the theoretical, curatorial or educational aspects of the discipline in the modern and contemporary periods. This might involve setting a challenge to the traditionally Western focus of art history as a discipline, perhaps with reference to the Caribbean, India, or black and Asian British culture, or addressing issues about historical memory and institutional power from within colonial and postcolonial histories.

The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302). The Open University is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.